Power goes out for a few seconds, knocking out the computer & router.
Kid gets back onto school session on phone, as router finishes rebooting.
Teacher: “Thanks for getting back on–”
Power goes out again, knocking out the router….
Category: Wandering.Shop
Project Loon is being shut down because Google couldn’t find a working business model for …
Project Loon is being shut down because Google couldn’t find a working business model for internet balloons.
When I first read about the idea (aimed at places where cell towers would be hard to set up, or during disaster recovery) I immediately thought of the aerostats in Robert Charles Wilson’s SF novel, “Spin.” In that case it was a solution to replace satellite communications because a mysterious barrier had blocked off access to Earth orbit.
Misspoke “thread ID” as “threat ID” and now I’m thinking about advanced persistent threads
Misspoke “thread ID” as “threat ID” and now I’m thinking about advanced persistent threads
TFW you put in the ear buds, turn on the music, and realize immediately that …
TFW you put in the ear buds, turn on the music, and realize immediately that YOU LEFT THE VOLUME WAY TOO HIGH because last time you were listening to a podcast or maybe just something recorded before the Great Loudness Wars of the 1990s.
Teacher: Right now all I can see is your wall. Kid: Actually it’s my ceiling….
Teacher: Right now all I can see is your wall.
Kid: Actually it’s my ceiling.
Teacher: The camera needs to be pointed in your direction.
Kid: It is pointed in my direction, just a little up.
Me: *sigh* Think three dimensionally.
Kid: Fine …
Kid is too tired to go to bed, but not too tired to send .gifs about how tired he is
Kid is too tired to go to bed, but not too tired to send .gifs about how tired he is 🙄
First LED bulb to burn out. It wasn’t completely off like an incandescent or flickering …
First LED bulb to burn out. It wasn’t completely off like an incandescent or flickering like a fluorescent bulb, but it was just very dim. The crack is weird.
Note: Consensus was likely heat damage, possibly from a power surge.
Why are you punching the RABBIT?
Kid’s playing Minecraft with a friend who is new to the game
Friend: Why are you punching the RABBIT? Is it evil?
Kid: Oh, um, that’s a different kind of rabbit.
Westerners who reached China overland by way of the silk road picked up the name Cathay…
Related: Westerners who reached China overland by way of the silk road picked up the name Cathay from central Asia, and westerners who reached China by sea picked up the name China from southeast Asia, and they didn’t realize both names referred to the same country until the late 1500s, when a group of Jesuits living in China started comparing Marco Polo’s account to their own travels and couldn’t find anyone in China who had heard of this “Cathay” place to the north.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathay
The point where they met up with some Saracens in Beijing and asked them if they’d heard of “Cathay”, and they said, “We’re in Cathay right now” basically clinched it, though it took a while for them to convince everyone back in Europe.
Portuguese Jesuits in India sent someone overland to Cathay to check, and along the way he met a returning caravan who told him about the Jesuits they’d met in Beijing a while back.
Wiki-walking, found this article collecting “Early World Maps” from antiquity through around 1800. I’ve always …
Wiki-walking, found this article collecting “Early World Maps” from antiquity through around 1800. I’ve always found it interesting to look at maps where they got the coastlines right, because they needed to be for sailing, but the proportions are all wrong. And it’s fascinating to compare the older Chinese maps that sort-of include Europe to the older European maps that sort-of include China, based on what little was known of each other at the time.
Me: Want some breakfast? Kid: …
Me: Want some breakfast?
Kid: …
Me: (makes coffee, waits for it to brew, puts some food together, sits down, takes one bite and starts to read)
Kid: Can you get me some breakfast?
Online school, week 1: OMG need to get showers and be presentable before the kid’s …
Online school, week 1: OMG need to get showers and be presentable before the kid’s class starts just in case we show up in the background for two seconds!
Online school, week 527: Fuck it, I’m not doing anything until the coffee’s kicked in.
Alumni association sent me an email about the upcoming “Stay@HOMEcoming” event(not that I ever went …
Alumni association sent me an email about the upcoming “Stay@HOMEcoming” event
(not that I ever went to homecoming when I was *at* the school, so it’s not going to be any different…)
Discovered via iNat that one of my cameras (the compact one with the good zoom …
Discovered via iNat that one of my cameras (the compact one with the good zoom that I like using for birds) was off by exactly a month. Apparently I messed up the DST adjustment
Except that I didn’t mess it up *on* the DST weekend. As I went through fixing timestamps on observations since November, I discovered that the first couple of weeks had the right date, but the wrong time.
I’d forgotten to adjust it on DST day. And then I messed it up when I noticed. 🤦♂️
Kid’s friend just found an “Escape the Zoom Meeting” obstacle course on Roblox
Kid’s friend just found an “Escape the Zoom Meeting” obstacle course on Roblox
Kids friend glitched onto the top of the nether in a long running survival realm …
Kids friend glitched onto the top of the nether in a long running survival realm and is stuck. They’re trying to get more ender pearls to him to get him back without turning on cheats
Once 2 of them were stuck on top of the nether, we all agreed the sacrifice of achievements was worth it. Well, almost all of us. There was some drama over the holdout
Indonesian volcanic eruption
the phrasing “Light eruptions continued during the day” just sounds weird to me, like a weather report about light rain showers.
uspol, mental health
Left for a 30-minute walk before lunch (Pacific time), when the latest news out of DC was just Ted Cruz being an ass as usual. Got back, wife cornered me and whispered, “Did you look at the news before you left?”
Been doomscrolling news of the coup attempt for the last 3 hours. She’s stress-baking, I’m stress-eating, kid’s stress-watching youtube game play-throughs.
First day back at online school for the kid, who kept refusing to go to …
First day back at online school for the kid, who kept refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour over the last few days and insisted on not getting out of bed for, like, an hour this morning.
It’s been “fun”…
“Why is it called ‘Oof this sword still sucks’ if it’s awesome?””I should rename …
“Why is it called ‘Oof this sword still sucks’ if it’s awesome?”
“I should rename it.”